#anyway. chip on my shoulder

[devilsskettle]

most common response to recently cutting my hair short is “were you scared to do that?” or “how did you have the balls to do that?” or “what made you decide to do that?” and it’s like 1) that’s not a compliment even though you’re framing it like a compliment, 2) why is it scary? does it scare you to make non-permanent changes to your appearance? does it scare you to be gender nonconforming in a very minor way that does not actually challenge anyone’s perception of you or your gender? 3) nothing compelled me to do this beyond standard reasons for getting a haircut. my hair was too long and i wanted it to be shorter, that is the full story. i do like it though it does look good and i don’t mind people telling me that if they’re not weird about it

[sparrow-in-boots]

ten times divorced idiots <3

[fadedflora]

i have not listened to hamilton in like a week why is he STILL HERE

read the tags if you want to see me talk about musicals for a little TOO long

[soldatrose]

[tarsusingkirk]

[chin hands] omegaverse difanghua is s o interesting and it would be double the interesting if feihua were both alphas, and emotionally constipated in their own unique ways. it puts their rivalship in new light bc, ykno, alphas are knotheads, who fight before anything else.

alphas fight to impress the one they want.

they fight to be viewed as an ideal mate.

they fight to establish an hierarchy amongst themselves.

they fight because it's the easiest way to protect those they want to protect.

di feisheng has only ever known that violence when he meets li xiangyi and li xiangyi is already too immersed sect politicking to care about anything beyond his sect, his pack. the superficiality of his reactions to di feisheng are like a mocking slap to feisheng's face because what feisheng is unconsciously looking for is not what li xiangyi is looking for. oh, not at all.

li xiangyi's already a topdog, and alphas go out of their way to bare their necks and bellies. of course it goes to his head, why wouldn't it. so he doesn't need to pay attention to dynamic behavior, doesn't need to see beyond feisheng challenging him as a rival sect leader.

and then ten years later, li lianhua is a broken, changed man; an alpha that disdains everything his dynamic is.

and di feisheng is still as he was, just more prone to alpha-rage and postering. the fact that li xiangyi is dead is something completely incompatible with him. he's spent ten years quietly denying a reality that would leave him totally isolated.

anyways this got real long and is more feihua than difanghua but listn

they both go thru the events of the series automatically assuming fang duobing is a bratty lil beta (he's not, hes a bratty lil omega uwu) because of how much a nonthreat he is, how much he coasts under their instinctual protective radars.

it's a combination of things, really. lianhua is a dying man, and he hasn't had regular ruts since he was first poisoned. feisheng never had regular ruts in the first place, and when his body went through the shock of simultaneously winning an alpha-fight, losing a potential mate, and almost dying, its biological equilibrium was fucked up. what this means is their bodies just aren't in the game. which means they aren't in the social game of playing their parts as alphas. yes, they both still have latent alpha instincts but it's incredibly easy for them to just ignore these instincts and function as dynamicless.

they are both also functionally packless alphas, and just don't consider fang duobing as someone who has their protection. that changes, of course, for li lianhua when he finds out who duobing's sperm doner father is. it begins to change when di feisheng has amnesia, and he's constantly in proximity with duobing and lianhua as ah-fei.

[tamaharu]

okay thats interesting! in the SF try-outs during the song "legally blonde" she sings about how she cant be legally blonde, while in the official version AND THE DEMO she sings about letting her be legally blonde. which means that at some point they changed the lyrics around, and then changed them back! laurence o'keefe.... nell benjamin.... what occurs in your twisted minds

[onewomancitadel]

I don't need to be mean to people who have a kink for the Emerald-Cinder dynamic. It's already dire out there enough for them being totally barren of narrative sensibility. I don't need to kick them when they're down

I did already make an enemy of one of those big blogs and I know that other big Cinder blog definitely doesn't like me either. God it's so fucking funny I can't help myself I'm sorry.

[operat0r]

causality

"So. What changed your mind?"

A greater thing rests between them than their meal and than their silence. The Tenno raises a cup to his lips and drinks and ponders the impossibly familiar taste. The scrubbers do their work but they rob even water of its essence, leaves it somehow stale and dry on his tongue. It is nothing like the golden chalices of Orokin moons and stations. It slides over tongue and throat and reminds the Tenno of things he's kept carefully, carefully locked away.

Not that it matters now. The dormizone is familiar, even with its grave-dust air. He knows this place as well as he knows the man who sits opposite him now, this man who looks at him with a stern, bullish familiarity he has not yet earned.

Between them languishes a platter of food cubes, which neither party picks at with much enthusiasm. Between them, a rift wound through time and distance and sheer [im]possibility. Perhaps it is another part of the eternal dream, some lonely delusion that's somehow managed to break the seal the Tenno keeps on past and memory. He is child but not, eternal but not, he who is fourteen or sixteen or eight-or-nine hundred. Why in all of creation would he chose, then, to imagine the tired face before him?

They've the same eyes, regardless: like suns, corona-bright, tired in their way. He knows without knowing and in this, perhaps, the distance between them is made lesser.

He says, "I don't know what you mean," and the other -- this Drifter, unbound from paradox by paradox itself -- frowns with disapproval and impatience both.

"Yeah, I think you do. Come on. What's the point in lying to me?"

They bristle as they chew, reflections of one another. There's no metal in or on the Drifter's face but his nose is bent a little too much to the left and there is a single, deep gouge taken from just below the left cheekbone.

The Tenno says tartly, "I do not answer to you."

"But you do answer to her," the Drifter says, and here the Tenno lifts his eyes. It's an expression he knows well enough, one the Drifter himself has flashed to many a shade and ghost, Dax and King in the moments before and after the blade. Their eyes burn in mutual distrust, smoldering with an anger that has plagued them both, two sides of a singular, unpleasant soul.

"Not anymore."

"Bullshit."

The Tenno's lip curls. His hands are pale, the flesh beneath nails the black-violet of deep bruises. Ballas called them devils and their violence is perhaps the single greatest legend that remains of the old empire. With but a flick of his malnourished little wrist, the Tenno could turn the Drifter to dust, or worse. He knows it as well as he knows that on the other side of the room there is a photograph he cannot allow himself to look at -- and knows that on the other side of the mirror, the Tenno probably has done just that to someone else bearing his resemblance while the Zariman drifted through the Void.

"Not anymore," the Tenno says again with practiced evenness, as if he were the adult here at their shared table and not this stranger wearing his face. "She is gone."

"She's not gone, kid--"

Chopsticks clack, nearly snapping by the force with which they are slammed upon the table. This small violence startles the Drifter and so the Tenno leans forward in challenge. "Do not," the Tenno hisses, "Call me that." His eyes shine dangerously. "She is gone, and for the life of me, I do not know why you cling to her so."

"It's because we have that in common."

The lines upon the Drifter's face are tense. Neither of them are strangers to their violence, the Tenno realizes, but only one of them has ever had the advantage of the Void and the curse it bestows upon those it touches. Across from him sits a man who has had to cut his teeth on the pedestrian ways in which people unlike him do: through sweat and blood and battered knuckles, with blades that have cut him as often as his foes. No doubt beneath his jumpsuit, the Drifter wears plain the full weight of his own wars.

"Like it or not," the Drifter continues, taking a breath, "She's saved us both. You know that as well as I do. So there's got to be an answer. What changed, between you out there and me in here? What's happened that makes you hate her like your life depends on it?"

Between them lurks a standstill. Slow and careful, the Tenno takes another drink of water, takes up his chopsticks again, and marvels briefly at the slight bite of well-worn wood against his fingers. He keeps his eyes low but for the brief flick from beneath his brows, and the Drifter knows he being appraised.

"You might be right," says the Tenno, adding a blue cube of food to his plate and then a green one. "I do not know who has it worse."

---

It was foolish to even try, the Tenno decides. The Lotus -- no, Natah -- bears him love only because it is what her own ghost commands of her. There is nothing, he decides, that shines behind her eyes while she dangles from his grasp and bids him let her go.

It is his lapse of judgement that undoes him, he's certain. It is fleeting sentimentality, a moment where he forgets himself and all he's become with or without her meddling. He does not recall when Margulis was mangled and robbed of her sight, nor does he recall when or how exactly it was that she was taken from them entirely, but he is certain, so certain, that he could not have possibly wept.

And when the blade cuts through him, when Eternity at last lays claim upon that which should have died and vanished upon the Zariman all those years ago, he is certain he does not hear her scream.

---

In the end, the Drifter realizes the Tenno cannot be moved. His disappointment is palpable. The Zariman is home now only to the dead, fated to remain as a grave of unspeakable size, the first of many the children of the Ten-Zero would ultimately create with their void-witched hands.

The Tenno is unbothered by ghosts. But when the Drifter leaves him, pausing just the once in the doorway before electing not to look at him after all, he leaves something behind that unnerves his younger-but-not self.

Life support still wheezes to life in regular intervals, rattling through her tremendous broken bones. Something has come loose in an air vent a room or two down the hall. He's heard the sound from hundreds of those he's cut down himself: wind desperate to find some place to go, pressed through lungs on the razor edge of collapse.

It is not this that unsettles. He sits alone, the Tenno, the seat opposite him emptied and pushed away from the table. Its much more quiet than the Orbiter even without Ordis chattering at him. But neither is it this solitude that disquiets.

There is a saying he has heard more than a few times in his travels, often muttered fearfully by those with superstition in their hearts. They say, "I feel like someone's just walked over my grave," and sometimes they move their hands or bow their heads or give the Tenno a knowing look that he simply cannot return. Up until recently, he has never died -- not in a way that mattered, in any case. Not in a way that stuck.

In the Drifter's wake, something changes. Maybe he sees the lights dim just a shade closer to grey or feels the air chill by a degree or two. Maybe he is dead this time. Maybe Ballas was right and this place is the hell to which he belongs. The Tenno feels the cup between his hands, tastes the unpleasantly tasteless water that slides down his throat. And as it goes, it chills him and at last he understands: there is someone walking over his grave and, for the first time since he's surfaced from the dream, he is well and truly alone.

[devilsskettle]

i also just feel so bitter towards other people lately. all the posturing and ego and entitlement…… i see it everyday everywhere and i’m sick of it

[barbiepappa]

"I write to them, y'know. I think a part of me was hopin' it'd bring me closure, but so far the only thing I've gotten out of it is a pile of unsent letters, dead names in my own crude handwritin' on envelopes addressed to a place I haven't been to in years. Constant reminders of ghosts and the guilt that comes with them. But I still write, so I guess I must be gettin' something out of it other than self-pity. So maybe it does help me work through my grief. Perhaps it fuels my denial. Maybe I'm scared I'll forget them. The one thing I know for certain is that even if I wanted to, I don't deserve to forget."

[other-peoples-coats]

hey you think that after Leia saw the death star destroy alderaan, after she knew that her people were now a scattered, nearly extinct culture, she told herself that at least she could ask Ben how to cope with it all? (my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed like all would fail now, her planet is gone wiped from existance did they know did it hurt)

as if it's something you cope with, as if -- but Ben would understand the grief. Ben knew her parents. Ben could help her, could teach her how to keep moving, however shambling and limping, after the end of everything you knew. (Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi, you're my only hope and she hadn't meant it like that but it was true when she said it and it's true now, if not how she'd ever wanted to mean it.)

[torchickentacos]

ursa wip. drawing during powerpoints hour. feeling atla-y lately. annoyed at proportions but fuck it we ball, if I try to make it perfect I won't end up making it

[cruelsister-moved2]

enjoying my name is asher lev but im finding it so distracting how quickly they make oil paintings like dont those take months even for experts 😭

[spiinsparks]

         ||. something something so//ni.c has street rat energy something something about so//ni.c deliberately choosing not to have a chip on his shoulder (or, more accurately: refuse to let the chip that IS there, dictate his life like everyone else he’s faced), blah blah he knows the world sucks, he knows it hurts, he knows that putting his trust in people who don’t deserve it will bite him in the ass ; he KNOWS the world is swathed in shades of grey , he knows that it can be a dog-eat-dog world out there , he KNOWS if you don’t fend for yourself, nobody else will, because nobody’s obligated to , and sometimes no reason to trust in the benefit-of-the-doubt....

      but he chooses to believe in that benefit-of-the-doubt anyways ... because if he doesn’t then what does that say about redemption? and if there’s no redemption then what does THAT say about the good in the world? yes freedom of choice means people will make bad choices but it also means MAYBE they can be the good in the world he wants to see and it has to start somewhere. so it starts with him. even though he knows it can, sometimes, be a fool’s errand.

[silverislander]

(radio announcer voice) last night at dnd! our intrepid heroes have stumbled into a pirate gig and are setting a course for waterdeep, but not all is well in the hold!

captain is hot

both the old man wizard and the twunk drow barbarian are trying to fuck him UNTIL...

he appears to know too much about the barbarians past in waterdeep

he seems to be lying about his cargo, or at least not telling the full truth

he flirts with both the ranger (idiot) and cal (dyke)

but we agreed to join the crew anyway, against our better judgement, because we were given a tip telling us it's the right way to go to finish our quest (and the pay is 40 gold a week, that's more than half of them have ever made in their lives). ranger is acting navigator, we've got the wizard helping the ship medic, the barbarian doing whatever the fuck w the sails bc he's strong as shit, and cal and the monk (previously a pirate himself) acting as powder monkeys. things only got weirder from there

ranger has never seen barnacles before. he quietly tries to speak to them, in awe of this new creature, only to be sung at barbershop-quartet style

he's also hungover and has never been on a boat he's about to invent new kinds of seasickness

cal isn't great at being a powder monkey- gets fed up with how big and inconvenient the cannons are bc she can't clean them right. monk says they have to be that big to do damage to other ships. cal retorts that maybe there should be smaller cannons, like hand-size, but they could just use more of them instead. monk and cal invent the world's first gun

the captain calls cal calliope. she corrects him because she doesn't go by her full name. nobody told him her full name how the fuck does he know her full name.

(cal joined in part bc she thought you couldn't get arrested on the ocean if this motherfucker knows her or god forbid has met her enemy on the guard she's so fucking dead)

a storm rolls in and almost knocks cal and another sailor overboard. an octopus is flung onto the monk's face. she's screaming about almost dying, he's screaming about the kraken, the barbarian is rescuing people left and right like the cover of a romance novel

... and after it's over, a coffin bound in heavy chains is laying on the deck of the ship

it's gonna be a long way to waterdeep.

[fox-mulder-gets-pegged]

Fighting the Cain instinct so fucking hard rn.